


the great pretender

by calamityrogers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Stucky - Freeform, headcanons, recovering bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 20:16:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18948073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calamityrogers/pseuds/calamityrogers
Summary: For a while, Steve pretends that nothing has changed. He still sees Bucky as the same man he was when they were young; he thinks they can still do everything they used to without any complications; like the seventy-something years of pain, torture and unconsciousness never happened, like it hasn't changed anything. Or anyone.Bucky gets these dreams sometimes. He doesn't know how to feel about them, or rather, he doesn't know how to feel about the people in them. Most of them are probably gone by now, he knows, but there's one man that's almost always in them, and that man is standing right in front of him when he wakes up.





	the great pretender

Bucky comes home, and for a while, Steve pretends that nothing has changed. He still sees Bucky as the same man he was when they were young; he thinks they can still do everything they used to without any complications; like the seventy-something years of pain, torture and unconsciousness never happened, like it hasn't changed anything. Or anyone.

Steve could pretend his best friend is normal. He could pretend that Bucky doesn't have a primal urge to reach out and hear the snapping of Steve's bones if he gets too close. He could pretend that Bucky doesn't know how to disarm and slit a man's throat with just a flick of his wrist.

He could pretend that all of this wasn't his fault.

That the screams Bucky hears in his dreams aren't a result of him not trying hard enough to save the one thing he cares about most. 

So that's what he does.

He pretends he doesn't see the blank, dead look behind Bucky's eyes when he looks at him. He pretends he doesn't notice the rigidity of Bucky's movements, the way he does everything with a cautious precision, as if he'd get punished for slipping up. He pretends he doesn't hear Bucky mutter things to himself in Russian or German or Romanian (or any other of the fifty-two languages he was forced to learn, except for good old-fashioned American English) at three-o-clock in the morning. He pretends.

He pretends.

He pretends Bucky remembers him.

___

Bucky gets these dreams sometimes. He doesn't know how to feel about them, or rather, he doesn't know how to feel about the people in them. Most of them are probably gone by now, he knows, but there's one man that's almost always in them, and that man is standing right in front of him when he wakes up.

Whether they're dreams or memories, he doesn't know. Some of them are so specific that he knows they must be real, but others, others are so confusing that he thinks his cerebral cortex glitched and fabricated them. Or something. It wouldn't be surprising if they _are_  just a figment of his imagination, seeing as his brain has been completely and totally fucked over. 

He's having a hard time trying to process what's real or not, what's _him_ or what's HYDRA, what's now and what's then. He could just ask. He could ask Steve, or the man standing beside him, the one called Sam, or he could ask... Natasha? Natalia? The one with red hair.

She would know, he's sure of it.

But he doesn't really think he could just walk up to her, or them, and ask if, when he came home from work (long days spent by the docks, or the railroad, the bakery, or the butcher? he wasn't so sure), would he sing along to The Andrews Sisters or Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald or whatever was playing on the radio and dance around with (a much smaller) Steve in their apartment? 

He doesn't see himself asking the three  ~~strangers~~ people in front of him if once upon a time he'd stayed up all night, clutching Steve's rosary, praying to a God he's not sure exists  (he's Jewish, isn't he? Bucky can't remember, but he was definitely not religious, that's for sure) that Steve's fever will break and he'll make it through the night. He doesn't want to humiliate the man, the hero, the one they call Captain America, by asking them whether or not he held the bucket as Steve vomited his guts out because of the sulfa pills the nurses at the hospital Steve's mom (Sarah Rogers, deceased, 1937, Bucky's brain reminds him) had worked at had prescribed for the "twenty-year-old man with a two-year-old's immune system"'s bladder infection. 

And he's **_definitely_** not asking how he knows what the skin over Steve's hip bones feel like underneath Bucky's calloused hands, or how he knows that those lips taste like apples, Lucky Strike cigarettes and cheap whiskey stolen from the speak-easy down the road, or how he knows that when Steve blushes, it goes all the way down. He refuses to describe Steve's body moving under the sheets of their bed, the hot, sticky feeling of sweaty skins pulling apart from each other so welcome in the winter, when the windows were stuck and couldn't close and they only had each other to keep warm. 

That's the part he struggles dealing with the most.

If Steve and Bucky really were... doing those things, if they really were _that_ close, then how did this all happen? 

He remembers a bigger, stronger Steve, a train, and a mission. He doesn't really remember anything else, apart for waking up in a lab, and the pain in his arm that wasn't there anymore (unless you count the mass of shredded muscle and bone hanging on by threads of his skin, which frankly, he doesn't). Vaguely, he remembers the pain somewhere else too, in his lungs, or his chest.  

Or maybe it was his heart.

The more he thinks about it, the more it seems like his arm wasn't the only thing torn away from him that day. 

Steve's looking at him now, and so is Sam, and so is Natasha. He doesn't know why. They'll do that sometimes, just sit there, staring. At him. Like they're trying to see someone else.

Other times, they don't stare at all. They'll look away, keep themselves busy, never let their eyes meet his, and only talk to each other, never to him. He's grateful for this. It means he doesn't have to think too hard about interacting with people. He's not very good at that, unless it involves killing. Then he's the best. 

Bucky tells himself that he's changed. He's not the same man that was captured and tortured for years. He's not the same man that murdered all those people in cold blood. He's not the same man that was drafted into the war and complained about muddy boots and undelivered letters to men with silly names like Dum-Dum Dugan.

He's not the same man he was in 1938. 

He's not the same man he knows Steve pretends he is. 

He's not the same man, but maybe he could do what Steve does.

Maybe he can pretend.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic, like many others, takes place in that little gap between the winter soldier and civil war. it's short, but it's filled with headcanons and all my feelings. i wrote this instead of studying for my algebra exam. enjoy! :)


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